To increase transparency and completeness of research manuscripts, research-reporting guidelines are developed. Research reporting guidelines are tools for authors and reviewers to ensure completeness and transparency of reporting. They are organized mainly as a checklist, explicit text, a flow diagram or a combination between these three elements and specify the items to be reported in a published study. An essential element of a reporting guideline is a list of items that are considered essential information to be included in each section of the research paper. Reporting guidelines commonly organise these items according to the typical sections of a research paper3 with typically various items per section . It is important to note that reporting guidelines and checklists are tools to help researchers and should in no way restrict writing style or interfere with the editorial or review process.
1.2 Goal
The goal of this project is to make the use of reporting guidelines easier during the write-up of a research paper by developing a writing aid in the form of Add-in in MS word (instead of a checklist). The writing aid will propose the items of existing reporting guidelines as a base for the writing of an article presenting scientific findings. The tool was evaluated in an intervention study and was developed as an aopen access to suit this study. In brief, in a research paper written in MS Word, parts of the text will be tagged by the authors or co-authors during write-up and linked to items of the checklist. The added values is the following
For the authors and co-authors, this will provide a tool to see how recommended items are described in the text so suggestions can be made accordingly;
For reviewers/editors, this will enable (i) identifying which text fragments correspond to the different reporting items using visual indications in the text (ii) obtain a summary of the different reporting items and corresponding page numbers and tagged text. These functions will produce a manuscript with additional information, embedded in the manuscript, that can travel with the paper during submission to a journal to facilitate the review process.
1.3 Notes
This Add-on software is thoroughly tested for the following combinations:
Windows 7 with Microsoft Word 2013
Windows 10 with Microsoft Word 2007
For any problems with the add-on, please contact Automaticals Consulting – AC#: info@automaticals.com IMPORTANT: if you have Mendeley Citation Plugin, you need to deactivate it for the writing aid to work!
Download the zip file here.
The manual can be found here.
To install and uninstall the software, check out the video here
To understand how to use the software, check out the video here.
This add-on is a free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see [here] (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/)
Created by Automaticals Consulting http://www.automaticals.com/consulting contact: mailto:carl.lachat@ugent.be Authors: Carl Lachat (Project manager, concept), Dana Hawwash (Project manager, concept), Patrick Kolsteren (Concept), Nathalie De Cock (Concept), Chen Yang (Concept), Herwig Jacobs (Programming)